business

This week I decided to walk to work instead of riding. 5K is a short ride but it’s at good hour long walk. To make the time go by I’ve been listening to a podcast called ‘Startup’. Startup is a podcast created by Alex Blumberg about creating a startup that makes podcasts… I know it sounds weird but its an awesome podcast that is extremely well produced, very entertaining and a super intriguing story especially if you’re looking to start a startup.

Earlier this week I was reading Steve Sammartino latest rant about the John Oliver Show being pulled from Youtube, and something that Alex said in the Startup podcast resonated with me. Alex was promoting a live podcast of him giving away all his secrets on story telling, which he is very very good at. His plug was “listen live for free or pay to download it later”. Brilliant! If you want to watch it live you can get it for free, but if you want it at a later date, sure you can download it, but you’ll have to pay for the convenience.

Why don’t more content providers do this? They can generate revenue from ad’s while live streaming and then from pay per download later… When you broadcast it live, it’s free you can guarantee more people will watch it. Then people who can’t watch it live or want to view it at a later date pay. You could even charge a higher price for a version with no ads.

I also like this because it brings back a consistent viewing time slot. Media on demand removes the “did you watch (insert name of cool TV show) last night” that I remember from my school days, which was a great conversation starter. With this model you’d be more inclined to get people watching content when its broadcast.

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately and by accident I happened to come across Shopify Masters. Obviously its a podcast focused on Shopify however their latest episode was great interview with Shawn Rowland from DronesEtc.com which I wanted to share. Shawn and his co-founder Jon Baird won the “everything else” category of the 4th Shopify Build-A-Business competition and judging by the interview they have been selling a shit load of drones.

Shawn and Jon Baird wanted to create their own lifestyle and be able to take care of their growing families. Motivated by seeing a couple friends achieve entrepreneurial success and Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Work Week, they set out to give it one last shot at starting their own company before falling back to Plan B and getting day jobs. This is a story of how Shawn went from $200K+ in student loan debt and had to re-mortgage his home to turn DronesEtc.com to a $600K/month ecommerce store.